


that ache in your heart (it don't know what to do)

by Hymn



Series: Hymn's Fic: The Mandalorian Collection [3]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Spoilers, about a year after season 1 i guess, or a little less, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22185223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hymn/pseuds/Hymn
Summary: The problem with remaining stationary, Cara thinks, is that it allows sentiment to grow.
Relationships: Cara Dune & Greef Karga, Cara Dune & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)
Series: Hymn's Fic: The Mandalorian Collection [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561399
Comments: 30
Kudos: 173





	that ache in your heart (it don't know what to do)

**Author's Note:**

> i've been researching for cara's backstory and took some ideas out for a test drive. tbh it's way past my bed time so here's hoping this is coherent :') 
> 
> title from Michelle Willis' song It'll Rain Today

  
  
  
“Hey,” says Karga. “You taking some time off?”

Cara looks out the window; they’re at the cantina, Greef Karga’s usual place of business. There’s a restless itch beneath her skin that’s been growing, becoming unbearable. Maybe Karga noticed. Cara’s been pacing more than usual, snapping and grunting instead of verbalizing. Kind of obvious, actually. So yeah, it’s probably that, or maybe he just knows how to check the date.

The fact that he’s carefully not looking at her implies that he’s trying to be _nice_ about this. Cara grimaces. Not that he sees it, too busy carefully avoiding potential eye contact.

“You trying to get rid of me?”

“Nah,” Karga says, all false bluster. “But never let it be said I don’t know how to treat those in my employ! What would folk around here think if you never took a day off? That I was a horrible tyrant? I can’t have that, Dune. Think of my reputation!”

Cara snorts. 

The sun’s getting low in the sky. Cara’s aimlessly wandering from table to table to bar and back again, the cantina mostly empty. Not quite late enough for work to be over but no longer early enough for day drinkers. The place is quiet; suffocating. Here and there Cara sees faint scars of the cantina’s fiery past, the wreckage left over from Moff Gideon. But she only sees them because she’s looking, and she’s only looking because she’s--

Grabbing a bottle from behind the counter, Cara takes a harsh swig of whatever it is, coughing when it burns going down. 

“Uh huh,” Karga says. “That’s just what I mean. They’re going to think I overworked you into alcoholism.”

“Shut up,” Cara mumbles into the bottle.

But Karga doesn’t shut up, because Cara’s pretty sure he doesn’t know _how_. Shuffling through his remaining pucks, Karga asks with unbelievably fake nonchalance: “Any idea when Mando’s supposed to come ‘round again?”

“Seriously?” Cara sighs. 

“Hey, now! It was just a question.”

Cara says, “Yeah, sure. Well guess what? I am taking some time off. Starting _now_.”

\---

She gets miserably drunk. 

Karga has to carry her ass home, which is something they will never speak of again if Greef Karga wants to continue breathing. Luckily for the both of them, he _does_ , so for once in his life Karga proves himself able to shut the fuck up about something.

Cara doesn’t want to be grateful about it, but she is.

\---

A day off turns into two, then three, _four_. Cara figures on the fifth day and no sight of Karga that she was right, he _does_ know how to use a calendar. If he didn’t know exactly what it was that has Cara so on edge then he’d probably be banging on her door, complaining bitterly that he was having to scare his own clients himself without her around to flex at them.

Instead he gives her space. She isn’t sure what to do with that space, or the fact that someone cares enough to give it to her. Not sure how to feel about having put herself into this position: where someone might know her at all, let alone this well. 

The problem with remaining stationary, Cara thinks, is that it allows sentiment to grow. 

If anything it makes the itching beneath her skin get worse. Instead of the cantina she paces her apartment, and when she gets tired of pacing that familiar floor she opens up the hatch to the roof and paces in the cold and the dark beneath the stars, unable to sleep without dreaming. 

On the sixth day, when the sun’s still so low on the horizon that Cara can’t see her own hand in front of her, she hauls out one of the speeder bikes she’s appropriated over the years. So far she’s collected seven of them, all Imperial and easy to store; she takes them apart piece by piece and then puts them back together again. It’s slow going since she’s not got much technical training, but worth it in the end when Cara’s hands have touched every single piece and laid claim to them, made them _hers_. It feels like thievery. More than that, it feels like justice.

It’s probably a bad idea to go out; she hasn’t slept, memories too loud every time she tries, shaking her awake from the inside out. The bike’s a 74-Z, a wild ride without the Imperial software to read data from its terrain sensors. 

But that’s why Cara likes it. What she needs right now, what she _wants_ , isn’t to feel safe.

Cara swings a leg over the bike, pulls a bandanna up over her mouth, adjusts the goggles over her eyes. By the time the sun lights up Nevarro, there is wind in her hair and sulfur in her nose; fire and burning, the heat of magma pressing in close. Cara revs the speeder beneath her, feeling the frame shake as the repulsorlift struggles to obey, to rise, to clear the sluggish pulse of lava sending up teasing tongues, trying to catch her.

But it can’t. Instead, she soars.

For a moment, the roar of the wind is loud enough to shut out the sound of all her ghosts come haunting. It won’t last, she knows; they always come screaming back. But she’s learned to take her victories where she can get them.

\---

On the tenth day, the Mandalorian appears.

Cara squints at him from her bed, tousled from sleep and annoyed, because it had actually been a half-restful night. “Please don’t tell me that Karga messaged you,” she complains, blaster still pointed right at the T of Din’s visor. “I don’t want to have to kill you both for this bullshit.”

“Please,” says Din, leaning casual against her kitchen counter. “I can read a calendar as well as him. Better, I’d wager.”

Cara rolls her eyes, but begrudgingly holsters the blaster. “Where’s the kid?”

“Safe.”

“Yeah, that explains that,” Cara mutters, but doesn’t bother to press. If the Mandalorian says his child is safe, then he’s safe and sound and probably three sectors away in the middle of fucking nowhere with a lethally armed nanny. 

The worrisome thing is that Din is here at all. 

There’s a part of her that wants to be more than annoyed at his presence, that he decided that _she_ needs a nanny. A part of her wants to rage and fight and snarl, that wants the black veil to fall down over her eyes, the void that sucks out all other emotion. But if she lets herself go that path there may not be any returning from it. So she doesn’t. Instead she settles for a complicated sort of frustration, scratches at her belly and thinks about finding a shirt instead of just lazing about in her support bra, but then decides-- fuck it. 

Din broke into her place in the middle of the night. If he’s got a problem with Cara in all her sleep-rumpled, skin-showing glory, then he can toss himself right out her third floor window. _Without_ his jetpack.

“The fuck are you even doing here?” Cara asks, slumping back down into her pillows. She presses thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets. Even with none of the interior lights on it still feels too bright, a world of blue-tinged shadows from the streets below, the moon above. Easy enough to see Din by. Which is a pity, since Cara can’t stand to look at him because she _knows_ why he’s here. And the way that makes her feel-- it’s just too much. 

“Dune,” Din says.

Cara snorts at the tone, prickling all over with irritation. “No, seriously. I saw your Beskar ass, what? A month ago? You must be getting awful lonely out there in the stars, Mandalorian.”

“You know why I’m here.”

“No,” Cara growls back. “I really fucking _don’t_.”

When he doesn’t answer, Cara just waits.

Eventually there’s a sigh, then a heavy clink as something is set down on the kitchen table beside him. Cara still doesn’t open her eyes but she’s paying attention, alert and wondering, listening for a clue. Because honestly? Din doesn’t _do_ this. Whenever he’s cornered he finds a way to escape. Cara thought he’d give up, maybe leave. After all, Din always acts as though sentimentality bothers him almost as much as it bothers Cara. 

It’s not the truth, of course. _He’s_ the one who’s secretly gentle, who can’t help but care; he just works hard at hiding all that vulnerability.

Cara can understand that: she _hates_ being vulnerable. Hates this feeling, raw in her gut and her chest, a wound like shrapnel through armor; all those sharp broken bits pressing in and in, killing her but too slowly, not nearly fast enough. So that she has to _feel_ it first, all that suffering. 

She wants to scream with it, but she locks her jaw up good and tight so no sound escapes.

Eventually, the urge passes.

“I brought you something,” the Mandalorian says, easy and soft. “I won’t tell you what it is, though. Not until you get up.”

Cara ignores him, pressing harder at her eyes so that there are constellations in her mind, whole nebulae and galaxies of stars sparking bright before free-falling into the dark. 

The sigh Din releases is more pointed this time around, like a chastisement. Cara’s petty enough to smirk when she hears it. Then he starts unloading his gear. Cara’s already familiar with the sound of it, the way he sets each weapon down with respect, with care. He’s got a lot of them so it takes a while, but when he’s done she hears the thump of his jetpack and the rustling of his cape being set aside, then the clunk of his boots coming off.

_That’s_ different.

He’s never taken his boots off before.

“You don’t play fair,” Cara says, lifting up onto one elbow, hand dropping so she can open her eyes. She has to blink several times before her vision clears, but then she can see him: seated on a stool now, thick socks and his gloves coming off, one finger at a time.

“Come,” he coaxes. “Sit with me.”

There’s a bottle of something on the counter. 

“If that’s wine,” Cara points out, “then I have to tell you I’m not all that keen to be drinking right now. Karga had to carry me home last time and _then_ the fucker sat with me all night so I didn’t choke on my own vomit.”

Din pauses in taking off his left glove, his right hand naked and strange in the dim light. He looks at her, helmet cocked, as if chewing over what she just said, carefully weighing his responses. “How much did you _drink_?” is what he finally settles on.

Cara grunts. “A lot.”

Shaking his head, the Mandalorian finishes taking off his gloves. They’re placed neatly by his elbow in easy reach. And suddenly Cara can’t stand it anymore, watching this man take off pieces of his armor, the parts of what make up _him_ , as real and necessary as skin or blood or breath in your lungs, just to try and coax Cara out from a lonely grief. 

She can’t fucking _stand it_ , that rage threatening to reach up and choke her again. So she gets up, glowering as fiercely as she knows how at this intruder in her home, her life, her stupid fucking _heart_. The posturing doesn’t make him go away, and the fact that she’s relieved he doesn’t just makes her glare even more. 

“I’m going to punch you,” she warns.

Din tilts his head quizzically. “Don’t you usually?” 

He sounds amused, the asshole. Cara gives up quick on the standoff, shoves her feet into the boots always kept near her bed. Doesn’t bother to lace them though: her own attempt at intimacy, at letting Din in close past her usual defenses. 

Then, finally, she stomps as gracelessly as she knows how over to the kitchen table, taking a seat on the stool next to him.

Din’s whole stupid body exudes approval. 

He’s practically gloating with it, Cara thinks, and kicks at a rung in his stool to make him wobble, clutching at the side of the table. The way he looks at her through the visor after is all disgruntled censure. It makes Cara grin a little mean. “Please don’t ask to hold hands and talk about our feelings or something.” 

Din says, humor wry in his voice: “Just drink the fucking wine, Dune.”

\---

It takes half a glass before she realizes: “This is Toniray.”

The Mandalorian doesn’t respond. Carefully doesn’t look at her, whole body held still and unobtrusive. There’s a lot of silence suddenly pouring in between them, filling in the cracks that have appeared in Cara’s voice, the gaping wounds comprised of memories and loss. 

She has to breathe real careful a minute, set the glass she’s drinking out of down gentle on the table, like if she’s not extra attentive she’ll forget her own strength and shatter it. She rasps out, “How the fuck did you--” before thinking better of it. 

The answer might destroy her, knowing what he did to get his hands on this; knowing that he didn’t even open it, the original seal on the bottle unbroken. That he never even planned to try a sip of it.

A gift, from Din Djarin to Carasynthia Dune.

A taste of home.

She gets up from the table and turns away, shoulders a blockade, back to the wine and the memories and this stupid man who brought them here. Her whole body flinches, the itch beneath her skin so strong she wants to rip her skin off, just in the hopes of it giving her some relief.

It won’t; she says, “Don’t go anywhere.”

Din doesn’t respond, but then: Cara doesn’t wait for him to. She’s across the room and up through the hatch to the roof in seconds, gasping in lungfuls of air. Her eyes are burning, blurring with tears so that the stars overhead are just smears of light, nonsensical.

Her chest hitches with sobs she won’t let herself take, hands trembling as she flexes them, held up in the air before her. Utterly useless. Powerless and pointless. All her hard earned strength, the battles she’s fought-- they’re meaningless. 

\---

Ten years ago, the planet Alderaan ceased to exist.

Cara’d been earning money on the streets any way she could half a galaxy away; busing tables, busting faces. She’d been nineteen and trying to pretend like the galaxy wasn’t setting itself on fire around her. Pretending like she had no stake in it, like it didn’t matter who won, Empire or Republic. But then--

_There are no survivors._

\--and just like that, everything changed. 

But it only changed for the worst possible reason. Because Cara hadn’t been on Alderaan since she was fifteen. Had packed up her stuff and hitched a ride off planet. Never bothered to look back, even when shit got hard, even when she was starving or down on her luck or with her back up against a wall. So it’s always seemed stupid to her that she might grieve Alderaan. 

She left it. Didn’t want it. Not family or home or tradition. 

It’s always seemed blasphemous to mourn something she never really loved until it was too late.

\---

When she goes back inside Cara tells him: “After I turned thirteen my grandfather started letting me have a glass of wine with dinner. Just one. Said he was cultivating my taste buds.”

The Mandalorian doesn’t say anything. He’s still sitting on the stool, still aiming for a posture that’s casual and relaxed. Still in his thick socks and with his knuckles bared to the world -- to Cara. She looks at his hands resting on his thighs rather than at the wine or his helmet; she thinks about taking them in her own and then almost laughs at herself. _please don’t ask to hold hands and talk about our feelings_ , indeed.

“How’d you know?” she asks.

Din shrugs with one shoulder. “I didn’t. Not that you’d ever had any. I just… I wasn’t sure how to explain.”

“What, explain the wine? Or the fact that you showed up two days out from the anniversary of Alderaan’s destruction _with_ the wine and all of-- of _this_ \--” she waves a hand at him, trying to encapsulate that she means the fucking _tenderness_. “Fuck’s sake, Din. You can’t just-- you can’t do this, all right?”

“...What?”

Cara shakes her head because she hasn’t the words, the power to explain what she means. That she doesn’t deserve this tenderness, that she’s not worth the effort. That she’s been idling on this planet for months now and she’s afraid that when she leaves -- when she _has_ to leave -- that it will feel like cutting out her own heart to put this place behind her.

She’s never wanted to _stay_ before.

With the ghost of Alderaan and all her dead so near, Cara feels more wild and afraid than ever at the notion. It’s wrong of her, isn’t it? Awful. Terrible to find a new home when the one she already had but hadn’t _wanted_ is nothing but dead rock in space.

“Dune,” Din murmurs. “ _Cara_. Talk to me.”

“I don’t want to fucking talk, Din,” she growls back, jerking her gaze away from his hands. The restless way his fingers are shifting against the fabric, the edge of his Beskar plates. She reaches for the Toniray with a shaking hand. The glass is smooth and cool against her fingertips; frustratingly fragile. The scent of the wine when she brings it near is suddenly overwhelming, full of memories and longing that can never be fulfilled. She shudders.

“Cara. Don’t drink it if--”

“Shut up,” Cara grunts. Forces herself to take a sip. Then another and another. She has to stop and gasp for breath before she's finished, heart pounding in her chest, fast and terrified. The thought of even another taste makes her stomach turn over. But-- she's tired of running. She drains the glass; reaches over for the bottle and refills it. “Least I can do, right? A toast to the dead.”

“I thought… I wanted to--”

Cara knows what he wanted: to comfort her.

She grimaces. “You didn’t think it would be easy, did you?”

Din’s silence is telling. Cara barks a laugh, rotates her wrist so that the glass tilts, the wine swirling within. She says, “You hoped, ‘cause it was me. Didn’t you? Well, sorry. I have hidden depths.”

“...That’s fine.”

Glancing up at him, Cara lifts the glass to her mouth, drinks again. “You think?”

Din’s fake relaxation starts to ease into something a little more natural. He settles onto the stool, leaning against the table, as if he hasn’t any plans on going anywhere any time soon. Seeing that makes the next gulp of wine go down a little easier. 

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re worth the trouble.”

Cara stares.

He ducks his chin. Outside, the sun must be coming up. Cara can see it reflected off his helmet, dawn slowly warming up all these shadows. He says, “I’ve put this much effort into our friendship, Dune. Be a pity if I threw it away now.”

On the lowest rung of his stool, his feet slip a little in their thick socks.

Cara says, “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” and actually believes him.

Din sits with her until the bottle’s dry.

\---

Two days later he’s still on her stool. But this time, he sits with her until all the tears have run dry.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks to star wars wikipedia for aiding and abetting. i saw a thing where it said that wine from alderaan was like... a fuckign collectible or something once alderaan was destroyed since you couldn't get it anymore and well, this happened. i forgot any and all details about it tho and was too tired to fact check so apologies if i messed up in any way.
> 
> thanks for reading, friends <3


End file.
